maybe self destruction is the answer
by nicalyse
Summary: Quinn does fight club with Puck and Blaine. One-shot. Quinn/Blaine/Puck friendship.


"Hey," Quinn greets, sidling up to Puck at his locker before class. He jerks his chin at her, not pausing in shoving his books in his bag. "My mom is working late tonight. I thought maybe you'd want to come over and keep me company."

She isn't flirting or propositioning him. Things have been different between them over the last few months, since she's stopped hating him on principle for being the guy who got her pregnant and stopped trying to use him to get Beth back. He's different than he was two years ago; she actually _likes_ Puck now, as a person, and they're friends. She just wants him to come hang out so she doesn't have to be alone in the house all night.

Also, his presence gives her the excuse to order a pizza with bacon, jalapenos, and extra cheese instead of the extra sauce, light cheese she'd normally get. She can splurge every now and then without losing control or feeling too guilty, she just likes to have a scapegoat when she does.

"I can't," Puck says simply, zipping his bag and pushing his locker door closed. He doesn't slam it only because he knows that she hates that; she doesn't say anything, but she appreciates when he does little things like that.

"What do you mean you can't?"

"I already have plans."

She falls into step beside him when he starts down the hall, holding her binder in front of her chest. "What are you even doing?" She hates hearing no, and she thinks she can probably talk him out of whatever stupid thing he's doing with the promise of free food. Puck isn't exactly difficult to please.

He glances down at her from the corner of his eye. "I can't talk about it."

She rolls her eyes. "Puck."

He doesn't say anything else until they're in Mr. Frye's government classroom, sharing a table like they do every day. Even then, he looks her straight in the eye and says, "I really can't talk about it, Quinn."

"Puck, come on. I just don't want to spend my whole night at home alone." Truthfully, now she wants to know what it is that he's keeping from her. Puck can keep a secret when he needs to - she should know - but she can't imagine that this is something like that.

He glances around to ensure that no one is listening, then meets Quinn's eyes. "I have fight club with Blaine."

"With Blaine?" she repeats, a little louder than she means to. Puck looks around again, then glares at Quinn, even though no one in the room is paying any attention to them. Even if they were, everyone in this room is a senior, and she doesn't imagine that many of them know who Blaine is anyhow. "Since when does Blaine go to your fight club?" she demands, her voice low and insistent. Now that he's told her this much, she needs the rest of the details.

"Since December," Puck answers simply. Quinn feels her eyes go wide.

"Are you serious?"

Puck looks toward the front of the classroom when the bell rings, but Mr. Frye is standing in the doorway, talking to (flirting with) Ms. Portman, the economics teacher from across the hall. "I'm not supposed to talk about it, Q."

She huffs out a breath. "Yeah, I know. I've seen the movie, too, Puck. First and second rule." Puck scowls. "You can't just tell me that Blaine goes to fight club with you and not tell me anything else."

Puck glances toward the doorway again, but Mr. Frye is still indisposed. "I guess he had a lot of aggression and shit from being picked on at his old school or whatever, so when he transferred to Dalton, he started a fight club." Quinn looks at him skeptically. "That's it," he insists. "He started going after Sectionals."

Mr. Frye comes in then and calls the class to order, though Quinn can't be bothered to pay attention. She's working too hard to reconcile her mental image of Blaine - the boy who listens to more Katy Perry than she does and wears bow ties - with the idea of fight club. Maybe Puck wasn't lying when he said that it was less about hurting one another and more about technique, because she really can't imagine that Blaine would do something entirely masochistic. She can't even picture him throwing punches, not quite, but it's the sort of thing guys his age find appealing, and she supposes that being gay doesn't negate the fact that Blaine is, in fact, a teenaged boy.

Later that night, when she's waiting for her pizza to arrive (with extra sauce and light cheese), she catches herself imagining what Puck and Blaine's fight club looks like. She's seen _Fight Club_ - more times than she'd like to have seen it, thanks to Puck - but she just can't picture these boys in some dim basement somewhere. She's heard rumors, too, because none of them can actually keep their mouths shut, and she knows some of the guys who are involved. Tyler Wright and Cody Carter, who are both first-rate losers.

In her mind, Puck and Blaine are standing in a circle with those guys and a rather sizable man who looks like the guy from _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_. The room they're in is dank and windowless with concrete floors, though the air is humid from body heat and sweat. In the middle of the circle are two barefoot, shirtless guys (they don't have faces in her mind either, but that's not the point), throwing punches and breathing hard while the guys surrounding them shout encouragement and curses.

She wants to experience that.

And look, she knows how this works. You don't just get to go and watch at things like this. If you go, you fight, period. There aren't any girls in this group; Quinn knows Puck, and he wouldn't have been able to resist telling her about the _'awesome chick fight I saw last night.'_

Quinn hasn't ever found a particularly good outlet for her aggression. She isn't Rachel Berry; she can't channel all of her emotions into music. Singing about it just doesn't work for Quinn. And honestly, she's tired of taking it out on herself. She doesn't want to isolate herself from her friends any more. She doesn't want to smoke or drink or sleep around or pretend to date seriously inappropriate men. At this point, she figures she might as well try hitting people and see how that works out.

* * *

><p>Quinn finds Blaine in the library the next day at school. He's sitting at one of the tables in the back where people rarely go, meaning that, unlike the tables near the computers, it's actually quiet. He has a textbook open in front of him, and he's making notes as he reads, rolling his pen between the tips of his fingers when he isn't writing.<p>

He glances up when she sits across the table from him, lacing her fingers together in front of her. "What's up, Quinn?" he asks distractedly.

She's sure that a boy would come up with some subtle way to broach the subject, but she doesn't have the patience for that. "I hear you're involved in fight club," she says simply, keeping her voice low even though there isn't anyone nearby.

Blaine lifts only his eyes to look at her, raising his head when she doesn't say anything else. "I beg your pardon?"

Quinn struggles not to roll her eyes. "Puck told me." Blaine's eyes narrow just a tiny bit. "He can keep a secret when it really matters, but the rest of the time he has a huge mouth."

Blaine scoffs, but he's smiling, so she doesn't think he'll hold a grudge against Puck. "What do you want, Quinn?"

She looks him straight in the eye when she says, "I want in."

* * *

><p>"What the fuck is wrong with you?"<p>

Quinn isn't surprised that Puck is directing the question at her and not Blaine even though he's the one who just said _'Quinn wants to do fight club.'_

Blaine insisted that they tell Puck, even though she'd just wanted him to let her come along with him the next time their group met. But apparently he and Puck drive together when they both go, and besides that, he said he wasn't comfortable going behind Puck's back since he was the one who took Blaine to the club in the first place. (He also wasn't sure that the guys would accept a girl coming along with the new guy; Quinn's pretty sure she could have talked her way in, but she doesn't really have a problem doing this Blaine's way.)

"I think fighting could be cathartic," Quinn tells Puck.

"And you think this is a good idea?" Puck demands, glaring at Blaine.

Blaine shrugs his shoulders, his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. They're standing out in the parking lot between Puck's Jeep and Finn's truck, and it's cold. "That's why I brought her to you."

Quinn shoots him a dirty look.

Puck shakes his head and looks at her darkly. "I do not fucking approve of this."

"It wouldn't be the first time I've done something without someone's approval," she counters. "As if I need _your_ approval to do anything."

He scoffs. "This isn't like having premarital sex, Q." Her jaw clenches. "It's not like quitting cheerleading or dyeing your hair fucking pink. You're talking about fighting guys who are fucking assholes. Some of them wouldn't have any problem beating up a girl."

"Don't underestimate me, Puck." He rolls his eyes. "I can take care of myself, and I don't need your permission to do this." She levels him with a look. "You think I couldn't find out where this happens without you?"

He doesn't say anything because he knows she's right.

"What do you know about fighting, Quinn?"

It's a reasonable question, and Blaine asks it quietly, like he still doesn't want to be involved in this conversation but can't help himself.

"Enough," Quinn answers simply, ignoring the noise that Puck makes. It isn't a lie. Sue has all freshman Cheerios take a self-defense course that she teaches, and the summer before sophomore year, Quinn and Santana took a kickboxing class, so if nothing else, Quinn can throw a punch.

There's also an awful lot of pent up anger and aggression just itching to come out.

"I'm going," she says after a long moment of silence. "Next week."

Her tone leaves no room for argument, but just to be sure, she turns and walks away, pulling her scarf up around her ears against the wind as she heads toward her car.

* * *

><p>"I'll just feel better about this if I know for sure that you aren't going to get knocked out in the first thirty seconds," Blaine had explained when he asked her to meet him in the old weight room, the one with the heavy bag. It was reasonable enough, so she agreed.<p>

Seeing Blaine in sweats and a plain white undershirt is strange. The only other time she's seen him look less than put-together was at Rachel's party, but she's not sure that counts since she was drunk, too.

"I was thinking we could talk strategy," Blaine says after they've said hello. Quinn nods. "The way I see it, you have two options. You can strike out hard and fast, or you can play weaker than you are to lure him in and tire him out."

Quinn is shaking her head before he even stops speaking. "No. I'm not going to waste my energy pretending not to be able to handle myself. It only works once, and the fact that I'm a woman means that they're already going to underestimate me."

"That's valid." Blaine hands her a pair of gloves. "Let's spar."

It's fun, trading punches with Blaine. They're fairly evenly matched in speed, and though he's stronger than she is, she's lighter on her feet. They're both pulling their punches, more interested in going through the motions than in actually hitting one another, but the flow of it is satisfying. She feels a little thrill every time she connects, even if she is just barely hitting him, and she grows more determined to best him every time she feels the brush of his gloves against her body.

He puts up his hands in surrender. when she catches the edge of his jaw with a glancing right hook. "Okay, Quinn," he says, reaching up to rub his jaw. Maybe she hit him harder than she intended. "I think you should come out tough, for sure."

She smirks. "I'm better than you thought, huh?"

"You are," he admits easily. "But Quinn...these guys are jerks. If they go for this at all, they're going to try to scare you out of coming back."

Quinn nods, undoing the velcro on her gloves so she can pull them off. "We don't know each other very well," she begins, looking him in the eye. "Those guys may try to scare me off, but I don't scare easily, and I'm kind of a bitch." The way Blaine smiles makes her think that he's heard a story or two, which makes sense when she considers that he's dating Kurt and is friends with Rachel. "It's going to take more than them being jerks to get rid of me."

He grins and holds out his still-gloved fist for her to bump. "Right on, Fabray."

* * *

><p>Puck comes by the house the night before they're supposed to do fight club. He hasn't said more than two words to her since the day in the parking lot, so she's surprised to see him.<p>

"What do you want?" she asks, pushing her bedroom door mostly closed. The words are rude, but she knows he isn't here just to hang out, so he might as well cut to the chase.

"Are you like, set on doing this stuff?" He doesn't swear because her mother is downstairs. He always says it feels weird to swear when she's around, like he's afraid that she might overhear and remember that he's the guy who knocked up her daughter.

"Puck-"

"Guys aren't supposed to hit girls," he says flatly. She sits on the end of her bed and watches him pace back and forth. "You aren't just a girl. You're..._Quinn_." He stops pacing and looks down at her. "I can't just stand there and watch one of those guys hit you."

She gets it. She does. Puck is protective of the people he cares about, and that's doubly true of women. She can't imagine what he would do to a guy who hurt his little sister. And she knows that Puck looks at her differently than he looks at most girls. After everything that they went through with Beth, she looks at him a little differently, too. Still-

"You're going to have to."

He looks stunned, like he can't believe that she's still set on doing this, even though he just came and said what he said. And she appreciates it, both the sentiment and how hard it must have been for him to find those words to admit that he cares about what happens to her instead of behaving like a caveman.

He doesn't say anything else before he leaves. It doesn't feel great, having Puck look at her like this and knowing that he's worried about it, but she still wants to do this. Maybe it's selfish, but she thinks that doing what she wants to do is more important that worrying about how it offends Puck's sensibilities.

* * *

><p>Puck refuses to meet Quinn's eyes when she gets into the Jeep. It's fine with her. She meant what she said last night, and she doesn't care whether he likes it or not.<p>

Blaine makes small talk from the backseat. She's only half paying attention, distracted by what's going to happen when they reach their destination and the palpable waves of what feels like disapproval that are coming from the driver's seat.

They head out north of town, first on a rural highway and then for another half mile or so down a washboarded gravel road. Puck slows to pull into a driveway that leads up to a red metal building - a shop or a garage, she thinks, rather than a barn - around which a handful of cars are parked. Puck parks the Jeep and kills the engine. The three of them just sit there for a moment.

Puck looks over at her. "You know if you go in, something's going to happen." She nods; she knows. "All right."

What she finds when she walks into the building isn't exactly what she expected. There are about half a dozen guys standing around, all shirtless, their feet bare on the concrete floor. Work benches line the walls on both sides, tools are hung from peg boards on the walls, and there's a blue tractor with mud caked on the tires parked at the back of the space. It's warmer than it is outside, but it's still cold, and she can hear one of the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Not what she expected, but this place is as well-suited to this type of thing as any.

It takes a moment, but once all the guys who are already there realize that Puck and Blaine have walked in with a girl, the room goes silent. That she did expect.

Quinn recognizes Tyler Wright when he come stalking toward them. He's a standard Lima loser, one of those guys who just barely managed to graduate from high school and never even attempted to leave town. He's her sister's age, around twenty-five, but he looks older, the result of drinking far too much far too often. And, presumably, from letting other men hit him in the face.

He stares straight at Puck, who has set his jaw. "What the fuck, dude?"

"She wants to fight," Puck answers simply.

Tyler's eyes flicker over Quinn, taking her in from head to toe quickly. His gaze is appraising rather than leering, which is a nice change from what she normally gets from guys like this. Maybe he isn't so terrible. "Nobody wants to hit a girl."

Puck scoffs. "Fuck off. You know those guys are big enough assholes to do it." He says it like it makes him sick. Quinn thinks that it probably does, yet she still feels no remorse.

Tyler looks at Quinn again. "You want to fight?" he asks, emphasizing the first word. She'd like to fight him for being such a condescending asshole. Instead, she just nods. "And you know the rules?"

"Unless the rules here are different, yes."

Tyler nods, his eyes moving down to her feet and back up again, lingering for just a moment around her hips. Of course he's just like the rest of them. "Wait here."

Quinn watches Tyler cross the shop, stopping with a couple of guys that she recognizes from around town. She recognizes nearly all of them, actually, and it surprises her that Puck is still hanging out with these losers and that Blaine was willing to join their little group. The guy that Puck was before might have seen the appeal here, but he's grown up a lot, and she expects a lot more out of Blaine's judgment of other people. Her friends are too good for these guys.

Puck's elbow brushes against the back of her arm when he crosses his. He and Blaine are standing close to her. Even though she doesn't look at them and they aren't really touching her, she can feel how close they are. She imagines that she can feel the tension in their bodies as well, though that could be her overactive imagination compensating in the murmuring quiet of this shop full of guys. The ones across the room, who have all gathered around Tyler and are discussing Quinn with varying levels of intensity, one or the other of them looking in her direction every couple of seconds. She meets their eyes every time, takes in their scowls and their disbelief.

It's odd, maybe, but it makes her feel powerful.

"All right, blondie," Tyler says after a while, breaking away from the group and walking toward Quinn. "Last chance to back out."

She glares at him, feeling her spine stiffen. "Either tell me to leave, or give me someone to fight," she says, her voice low and dangerous. She didn't come here to mess around.

Tyler smirks, and Quinn hopes that he's the one she gets to fight. She wants to slap the expression off his smug, ugly face.

"Fine. You'll fight Cody."

She nods once, not breaking his gaze until he turns and walks back across the shop.

Blaine touches her elbow, his hand dropping back to his side when she walks along with him to a workbench under which they all appear to have already kicked their shoes. "He fights dirty," Blaine mutters discreetly. "His favorite hits are sucker punches."

"He's a fucking prick," Puck adds lowly. "And he's gonna get off on hitting a girl. Rat fucking bastard."

"I got it," she says, toeing off her shoes. The concrete is so cold under her feet that it makes them ache. She doesn't wait for her boys, leaving them there taking off their shirts to cross to where the rest of the guys are circling around Cody Carter. They all move apart when she walks into the circle, stepping away from her like she thought only happened in movies for effect.

Several large pieces of cardboard have been duct taped together and then taped to the floor to form what she assumes is both boundary and a bit of insulation from the unforgiving concrete underneath. Cody is standing right in the middle of this, his arms crossed over his chest in a way that emphasizes his flabby stomach, staring at her like he's amused by the whole situation.

She's going to enjoy wiping that look off his face.

Tyler steps into the middle of the circle with them. "Since we have a lady-" he emphasizes the word, his voice laced with condescension- "in our midst, let's go over the rules."

Quinn struggles not to roll her eyes when he starts reciting the rules of fight club. He's a poor imitation of Brad Pitt, and his bravado isn't nearly as impressive as he thinks. She turns her back on him instead of listening, stepping towards Blaine and Puck and tugging her hoodie over her head. She's wearing a black workout bra underneath, which is as shirtless as she's getting in a roomful of strangers.

"Jesus fuck, Quinn," Puck mutters when she gets close to him, pushing a hand through her hair to tame some of the static. "Put your fucking shirt on."

She does roll her eyes at him, vaguely registering how strongly Tyler is emphasizing the 'two guys to a fight rule,' a signal to Puck and Blaine, she's sure. "Shut up, Puck."

"You don't have to prove anything, Q," he mutters, looking at her seriously.

She shoves her hoodie into his hands. "_Shut up_ and hold my shirt," she orders. If he doesn't understand this by now, she can't explain it to him. He's just going to have to deal with it. She spares a glance for Blaine, who has an impassive expression on his face, then turns back to her opponent.

It's pretty obvious, looking at his flab and lack of definition, that Quinn is in better shape than Cody. Even if she doesn't have visible abs like Brittany, she carries a lot of core strength, and the definition in her arms exceeds anything that Cody has. He outweighs her by fifty pounds at the very least, but he looks like the kind of guy who relies more on being mean than on being good.

That's just fine. Quinn knows how to be mean, too.

"And if it's your first night at fight club, you have to fight," Tyler intones, smirking at Quinn.

"Hey, you can't punch a girl in the face," interjects one of the guys in the circle who Quinn doesn't recognize. He's taller than the rest of them with a vaguely sick look on his baby face, like the scene in front of him is somehow physically offending him. She decides that she likes him. "And she can't go for the low blow," he adds, his eyes flickering to hers. It's reasonable, so she still likes him. It's an unexpected relief, the idea that she might not have to worry about being hit in the face like that; she's not so sure what it would mean for her nose job if her nose was broken. She isn't eager to find out.

"Fine," Cody says flatly, and Quinn nods. She didn't intend to use a low blow anyhow, so she isn't losing anything in the deal. He watches her for a moment, then tilts his head and grins. "I'll let you take the first shot, sweetheart."

She channels all of the loathing and adrenaline coursing through her body into a strong right hook to his jaw, hoping to make him regret underestimating what she's capable of doing to him. It hurts, her fist against his bone, but it's incredibly satisfying, the sting of the impact moving up her arm into her elbow, the tingling that lingers behind it.

The look of shock on his face and the way that everyone in the room shouts?

That's pretty satisfying, too.

"Fuck," he growls, grabbing onto her upper arms with both hands and glaring down at her. He shakes her once, hard, then pushes her backwards away from him. If he expects her to fall onto her ass, he's disappointed, because she just stumbles back a step or two before propelling herself back toward him, aiming another right at his ribs.

The first blow that he lands is directly to her solar plexus. It knocks the wind out of her and sends her reeling back, gasping. He follows, putting his hands on her shoulders and pushing her again. She doesn't know what he plans to do if he gets her on her back on the floor, but just thinking about it is nauseating. This excuse of a man on top of her in any way is unacceptable, and she isn't going to let it happen. That alone keeps her feet beneath her.

It does catch her off guard when his open hand comes down on her left cheek, the sharp sound reverberating in her ears. Just the idea of it, of a man slapping her across the face - of any man slapping any woman across the face, even when she's put herself in a situation like this one - brings up something hot and mean from the pit of Quinn's stomach. It rises up into her throat and comes out on a growl when she launches herself forward at him.

Her left knee hits the floor hard, but not as hard as Cody's back. Quinn barely takes the time to register the pain in her joint before she drives that knee into his side, hard, swinging her other leg over until she's straddling his thighs. She sits up high, ensuring that the only part of her lower anatomy touching him is the inside of her thighs, and leans over him, driving her left fist into the side of his face before bringing her open right palm down on his cheek. Tit for tat and all that.

Speed is her advantage now like her grace was before, so even though she's tired, she keeps throwing punches at his face, ignoring the way that his fingertips are digging sharply into her sides when he tries to push her off of him. Instead, she aims her fist as his nose, not even wincing at the sound that it makes when she connects, not pausing when the blood appears.

"Fuck! Stop!"

Quinn freezes when she hears the word, looking at him for just a moment before pushing herself to her feet and stepping away. She ignores the shouts and catcalls (of a sort) that come her way, looking down at her hands before using the one that doesn't have blood on it to push her hair back out of her face. Her necklace has twisted, so she adjusts the cross to rest against her chest again, the clasp at the back of her neck.

The satisfaction at her triumph is coursing through her, the adrenaline still in her system raising goosebumps on her skin and making her body tremble even though she feels overheated. She keeps her expression neutral though, because to show her pleasure feels like she'd be giving something away to these guys who didn't expect her to have anything to offer. She was worried about losing, but she doesn't want them to know that. By not showing her satisfaction, she leaves them believing that she knew all along that she was going to win.

(She never truly let herself consider that she might not, even though she was certainly aware of the possibility.)

When her heart rate begins to return to normal, she turns to find Tyler standing in the circle. "Who's next?"

Neither Puck nor Blaine fights that night, though Quinn can tell that Puck wants to do _something_, the way that his jaw is set and he keeps clenching his fists. She ignores him, not wanting to encourage him to get in over his head any more than he would on his own. She knows him, and if he was to get involved in a fight tonight, it wouldn't be about excess aggression or technique; whoever he fought would be standing in for Cody, and it would be personal. That isn't what fight club is about, and Quinn knows that implicitly.

The boy with the baby face, Nathan, fights the squat guy who works as a clerk at the gas station where Quinn usually stops to fill up her car. She doesn't know either of them beyond that, but she gets caught up in the atmosphere, and when Nathan brings his knee up to drive into the other man's abdomen, she shouts her encouragement. Blaine grins over at her like he knows something that she doesn't, but he doesn't say anything. Quinn doesn't take too long thinking about it, because Nathan kicks the guy's feet out from under him, making him cry out for the fight to stop when his head hits the floor.

There isn't any sort of official end to the meeting; Tyler asks if anyone else wants to fight, and when no one volunteers (Quinn feels oddly proud of Puck for holding back), it just sort of falls apart. Quinn stays where she is for just a moment, even though everyone else moves towards their shoes and shirts, watching the stiff way that Cody is crossing the room with a sense of satisfaction that is probably more than a bit twisted.

"Hey, blondie."

Quinn resists the urge to tell Tyler her name. She knows who he is, which means it's highly unlikely that he doesn't already know who she is, too. And besides that, it doesn't matter what he calls her, especially now that she's shown what she can do.

"You did good." _Well_, she thinks, though she says nothing. "Come back any time."

She arches one eyebrow at him, the condescending prick. "I think I proved tonight that I don't need your blessing to fight here." He blinks at her once, but she doesn't give him a chance to say anything, pulling her hoodie over her head as she turns to go get her shoes.

The ride back into town is almost as quiet as the ride out was. Blaine leans up between the seats to kiss Quinn's cheek before he gets out at his house. "I knew you could do it," he says for her ears only, calling his goodbye to Puck as he gets out of the Jeep and heads up to his front door. She watches him go, thinking that even if she never goes back to fight club, she'll definitely work out with him again. She doesn't know him well yet, but there's more to Blaine than she realized. She thinks he could be a good friend.

Quinn gives Puck an odd look when he pulls to a stop at the curb in front of her house and kills the engine. "I'm coming in to make sure your knuckles aren't broken," he says, nodding his head at where her hands are folded in her lap. The knuckles of her right hand do ache, they're swollen, and a couple of them are split.

"I can take care of it," she says, reaching across her body to open the door with her left hand.

"Shut up," he tells her, his gentle tone juxtaposed with the harsh words and the way he rolls his eyes at her.

She leads him into the downstairs bathroom when they get into the house so they don't disturb her mother in bed. She tugs her hoodie over her head and hangs it from the doorknob while Puck starts digging through the cabinet under the sink for first aid supplies. (He's never truly understood boundaries, so she isn't at all phased by his actions.)

He holds her hand under cool running water first, brushing her skin as gently as he's ever done anything to clean away the blood without irritating the wounds any further. It hurts when he presses more firmly, checking to see if the bones are broken, but she just grits her teeth and holds her breath. She's dealt with worse pain.

"I think they're okay," he tells her, reaching for the bottle of peroxide. "If the swelling doesn't go down in a couple of days, you probably want to go to the doctor so they aren't fucked forever." She nods, watching the peroxide bubble on her skin. "How's your knee?"

She glances up and sees that he's watching her eyes. "It hurts," she admits. "It's just bruised though."

He reaches for a tube of Neosporin. "I hated watching you do that."

"I know." Puck would hate watching any woman fight. Unless, of course, it was two women fighting and there was some stupid, sexist component for him to leer at. He's not as bad as some, and she knows that deep down, he respects women like she's only ever seen from men who were raised without fathers, but he's still a teenaged boy.

"You were good though," he admits, gently rubbing the ointment into her skin. She'll have to come up with some story to tell her mother about how she hurt herself since she can't really cover her knuckles with the standard band-aids that are all that's in the house. "Cody didn't know what the fuck to do with you."

She lets herself smile about it for the first time, watching him kneel to put the supplies back in the cabinet. "He isn't nearly as tough as he'd like to think."

Puck snorts, straightening up. "Yeah, I know." He reaches up and brushes the back of his fingers across her cheek, the one that Cody slapped earlier. "He's a worthless prick." She nods her agreement. "You're sure you're okay?"

"I'm sure," she confirms, leaning her hip against the counter.

"All right." She sees him glance at her hand again. "I'll see you tomorrow."

He leaves her standing there in the bathroom without another word, and for the first time since she decided that she was going to fight, she doesn't feel like he's disappointed in her.

* * *

><p>"What the fuck happened your hand, Q?" Santana asks when Quinn sits beside her in dual-credit English the next morning.<p>

Quinn shrugs carelessly. "I tripped going into the house and caught my hand between the brick and the bag I was carrying," she lies, focusing her attention on flipping pages in her textbook instead of looking at her friend.

"It looks like shit," is Santana's only response.

As easily as Santana - and later, Mercedes - accepts her answer, Quinn sees the way that the boys look at her when she gets to glee club rehearsal, the concern on Mike and Sam's faces and the confusion on Rory's. The girls may not know what knuckles split from fighting look like, but the boys do.

It's odd - though not any more odd than attending fight club in the first place - but Quinn finds that she likes the looks.


End file.
